While cooking pollo y verduras a friend of mine from csw turned to me and began a story with “mi mama.” Laughter of fluent Spanish speakers and even some csw students inflated the room, because while “mamá” means mom, “mama” means boob. Essentially my friend had started his story by saying “my boob…” after another friend explained this to him, one of our professors jumped in with an explanation of why the two words resembled each other and what connection they had culturally.
Students deciding to come to Costa Rica expected language immersion however the immersion is culture deep. Accompanied by Spanish class, our home stays and outside interactions guide us towards alignment with the culture of Atenas.
Our professors include traditional cooking, singing and dancing in our lessons plans. Understanding the culture parallels understanding the language; if someone asks us the dance and we not only understand but perfectly respond that we would love to but then only know how to fist pump, how fluent really are we?
The home stay and abroad program enriches our classroom education with cultural significance and slang phrases. We learned the idea of pura vida (pure life) used to say hello, goodbye, and when you can’t understand your host grandpa, and have begun to understand not only the language but the connections between the words.
I was excited for a language immersion program but have been pleasantly surprised to work towards fluency in all sects of Atenas life.